Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Well, I’ll get right to it.
In my last post – which I thought might be my lastpost – I said I might come back if somebody made me
mad. And guess what? Sure enough, somebody did.

No doubt you can guess who.
Yes, that’s right, it was a bail insurance company lobbyist, who insisted on
going down to New Mexico and trying to trash a project I was involved with
years ago here in Colorado. It didn’t work, of course, because the people in
New Mexico called me and a couple of others here in Colorado and we told them
the truth, something that the insurance lobbyist probably had a hard time
conveying in his presentation.

Bottom line is that I’m
coming back, and I’m going to go at this thing full time. Bail agents, you
should realize by now that the insurance companies are doing you no favors
anywhere in America. By rehashing the same tired and discredited arguments and
by misrepresenting the law and the research to keep the status quo, the
insurance companies are – perhaps unintentionally – sealing your fate.

Here in Colorado, everyone
can point to the single event that triggered all of us getting together to
change bail. It was when an insurance company lobbyist came in from out of town
and did what he was paid to do – keep the money flowing to the insurance
companies. The problem is that by doing so, he turned people against everyone
involved in commercial bail, including you bail agents. The insurance companies
are doing the exact same thing today in other American states, and unless those
companies radically change their tactics, you can bet that bail agents simply
will not exist in any form in America in the next 10 years.

I used to think that the bail
insurance companies might ultimately see the real issues and change their strategy
to actually help you agents, but now I see that they are too consumed with the
free money (that you all give to them) to do you any good. The future of bail
and no bail in America simply does not include the kinds of high dollar amounts
that seemingly require insurance company backing. And because they don’t belong
in any pretrial future that I can think of, insurance companies will continue
to argue to keep things the same. By doing so, however, they’ll continue to
lose. And as they lose, they’ll most definitely take you down with them.

As a bail agent, I know that you
rightfully take some pride (as we all do in pretrial justice) in knowing that you are helping to uphold the rights embodied in both the states’ and the federal
constitution. To stay in such a noble pursuit – to be able to feel the same
sense of constitutional pride for the next 100 years – you simply must see the
insurance companies for what they are and what they are not. Simply put, they are
the method of your demise. They are not your friends.

About Me

Hello everyone! I'm a criminal justice system analyst with 25 years of legal experience. I was editor-in-chief of the law journal in law school, and I worked as a law clerk to a federal appellate judge right after graduation. I then worked in private practice for several years in Washington DC before I came back to Colorado, where I became interested in criminal justice. I worked for both the state and federal courts of appeals as a staff attorney doing criminal appeals, and I also taught at Washburn Law School for a year before I got involved in the local criminal justice system issues in Jefferson County, Colorado. In that job I quickly realized that there was a lot of room for criminal justice reform, and that's what I've been doing ever since.

For the past several years I've been working on reforming America's traditional system of administering bail. Believe me, it really needs it. I started this blog because I was getting somewhat fed up with all of the slanted misinformation and self-serving research and analyses circulated in the field. This is my little way of chiming in.

I think I've had plenty of formal education, and I hope I'm not forced to get any more (although I'm taking two classes on Coursera!). I have a law degree, a masters of law degree, and a masters of criminal justice degree in addition to the two degrees that I got in college.

I am currently the Executive Director of a Colorado nonprofit called the Center for Legal and Evidence-Based Practices. It serves as my platform for performing neutral and objective research and analysis of topics relating to bail and pretrial justice. I hope that you'll get something out of this blog, which will undoubtedly contain a few things you aren't likely to find anywhere else.